Feedback: Don't forget the victims of juvenile lifers

Aug. 16, 2013

The Detroit Free Press editorial on teenage murderers was 529 words long, but it had one key word missing: victims.

■ A grandmother was sewing at home when a juvenile broke in to steal items and money. He shot her, and while she crawled toward the telephone, he left her to die.

■ A young wife, five months pregnant, stopped to offer a ride to hitchhikers. They wanted to steal a car and money, and then murder the driver to eliminate the only witness. The juveniles forced the pregnant wife to drive to a deserted area, where they made her kneel down and shot her twice in the head.

■ A police officer stopped a young driver with no license. Instead of making an arrest, the officer gave a warning and drove him to his mother’s apartment. Once there, the teen assaulted him. While the officer was incapacitated on the floor, the teen shot him in the head.

■ A 17-year-old spends weeks meticulously planning the “perfect murder,” including clean-up, a torch to burn off fingerprints and dismembering and burning the body. After he murdered and decapitated a Wayne County man, he told a friend: “Next time I won’t make the same mistakes.”

For the loved ones of these victims, there are no more Mother’s Days or Father’s Days or happy birthdays. Only painful remembrance. Their lives are torn apart. Trials compounded their agony, when the last moment of their loved one’s lives were replayed in excruciating detail. Now, they face the frightening prospect of a teenage murderer walking the streets.

Only the most serious charge of all — murder in the first degree — could ever result in a sentence of life without parole for a juvenile. These are not youngsters who made some silly mistake and stole a Snickers bar from the neighborhood 7-Eleven. They were all convicted by a jury of their peers for taking a human life.

And context matters. Crime in Detroit is already far too high, with an average of more than one murder per day. The city’s violent crime rate is five times the national average, last year rising to the highest of any city in America with a population of more than 200,000.

Moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld life without parole as a constitutional sentence. Since then, the Michigan Court of Appeals decided that the Supreme Court’s ruling on the issue of juvenile life without parole is not retroactive. In other words, the ruling does not apply to convicted teen murderers who have already exhausted their direct appeals.

And for good reason. Some crimes, especially first-degree murder, are horrific. It is the ultimate crime against not only the individual, but also against society. The entire point of “society” or “community” is living together. Murder violates the very core of our existence.

I am opposed to retroactively providing parole hearings to juveniles who have been convicted of murder in the first degree. I intend to stand firm. And I intend to stand with the victims and their families.